Search engines are increasingly getting serious about coughing up mobile-friendly results to users.
Now, on the heels of Google’s plan to up the mobile accessibility, Bing announced it is tagging results links with a “Mobile Friendly” icon.
“Mobile search continues to surge ahead and grow as a percentage of overall internet search queries,” Bing noted in a blog post. “In November 2014, we shared our plans to make significant investments towards understanding the mobile friendliness of web pages. Since then, we have been investigating various approaches that leverage mobile friendliness to deliver the best possible mobile search experience on Bing.”
The mobile-friendly tag allows mobile users to quickly identify the results most likely to perform well on their mobile devices.
And that’s not all. Bing will also be rolling out mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking.
“Our approach to mobile friendliness as a ranking signal balances the need to improve the ranking for mobile-friendly pages, with the continued focus on delivering the most relevant results for a given query. This means that for mobile searches on Bing, you can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile-friendly.”
But Bing — and other search engines — really, really want websites to get mobile-friendly as fast as possible.
To that end, Bing’s blog post included a succinct tutorial of what that actually means — from keeping click buttons distinct to formatting for the mobile screen.
Webmasters will get help from Bing, as it is developing a tool to help them analyze their webpages.
“This tool will become available a few weeks from now and help Webmasters find and fix areas of their site that suffer from mobile friendliness issues,” Bing stated. “Understanding the factors that influence mobile friendliness will help serve our growing mobile user base much better.”
Webmasters will have to make something transparent: their CSS and script files, so Bing can do the analyses.
